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<title>9.3 robotparser -- Parser for robots.txt</title>
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<h1><a name="SECTION0011300000000000000000">
9.3 <tt class="module">robotparser</tt> -- 
         Parser for robots.txt</a>
</h1>

<p>
<a name="module-robotparser"></a>

<p>
<a id='l2h-2087' xml:id='l2h-2087'></a>

<p>
This module provides a single class, <tt class="class">RobotFileParser</tt>, which answers
questions about whether or not a particular user agent can fetch a URL on
the Web site that published the <span class="file">robots.txt</span> file.  For more details on 
the structure of <span class="file">robots.txt</span> files, see
<a class="url" href="http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html">http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html</a>. 

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><span class="typelabel">class</span>&nbsp;<tt id='l2h-2080' xml:id='l2h-2080' class="class">RobotFileParser</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var></var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>

<p>
This class provides a set of methods to read, parse and answer questions
about a single <span class="file">robots.txt</span> file.

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2081' xml:id='l2h-2081' class="method">set_url</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var>url</var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Sets the URL referring to a <span class="file">robots.txt</span> file.
</dl>

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2082' xml:id='l2h-2082' class="method">read</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var></var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Reads the <span class="file">robots.txt</span> URL and feeds it to the parser.
</dl>

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2083' xml:id='l2h-2083' class="method">parse</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var>lines</var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Parses the lines argument.
</dl>

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2084' xml:id='l2h-2084' class="method">can_fetch</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var>useragent, url</var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Returns <code>True</code> if the <var>useragent</var> is allowed to fetch the <var>url</var>
according to the rules contained in the parsed <span class="file">robots.txt</span> file.
</dl>

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2085' xml:id='l2h-2085' class="method">mtime</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var></var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Returns the time the <code>robots.txt</code> file was last fetched.  This is
useful for long-running web spiders that need to check for new
<code>robots.txt</code> files periodically.
</dl>

<p>
<dl><dt><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr valign="baseline">
  <td><nobr><b><tt id='l2h-2086' xml:id='l2h-2086' class="method">modified</tt></b>(</nobr></td>
  <td><var></var>)</td></tr></table></dt>
<dd>
Sets the time the <code>robots.txt</code> file was last fetched to the current
time.
</dl>

<p>
</dl>

<p>
The following example demonstrates basic use of the RobotFileParser class.

<p>
<div class="verbatim"><pre>
&gt;&gt;&gt; import robotparser
&gt;&gt;&gt; rp = robotparser.RobotFileParser()
&gt;&gt;&gt; rp.set_url("http://www.musi-cal.com/robots.txt")
&gt;&gt;&gt; rp.read()
&gt;&gt;&gt; rp.can_fetch("*", "http://www.musi-cal.com/cgi-bin/search?city=San+Francisco")
False
&gt;&gt;&gt; rp.can_fetch("*", "http://www.musi-cal.com/")
True
</pre></div>

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